Understand this: No one ever gets up one day and says, I am going to start "seeking" from tomorrow. Seeking happens.

And understand this too: once seeking begins, it takes its own course.

Though every seeker is led up his own individual path, it has been observed that seeking, by and large, follows a similar pattern for a similar category of seekers. For instance, there is a broadly discernible pattern for seekers who are of contemplative nature (the jnana marg). Though one cannot generalize, it has been observed that for people who are contemplative, the seeking broadly goes through the following stages:

First Step. There is the sense that some other force (other than oneself) has the final word on what happens. To begin with, the seeker starts out by thinking, “I am in charge most of the time but sometimes the other 'force' dictates the course of events - whether I like it or not.”

Second Step. The seeker sees how each action happens: the mechanism of thought-vocalisat…